As a result of a distributed synchronization scheme of a switch having multiple fabrics and port cards that uses striping, the fabric must stop its output to account for “extra” clock cycles. To make fabrics maintain logical synchronization as they stop their output, each entire fabric must freeze its current state, referred to as lockdown, for the same number of cycles as it stops its output. Adding gates to lockdown every register in an entire design can be very costly. Normally, every register would require a feedback mux and control logic for the mux. The present invention, otherwise known as propagated lockdown, attempts to minimize the amount of additional logic needed to lockdown the memory controller. Propagated lockdown is a new way to simulate complete lockdown of the memory controller without adding a feedback path and control to all registers in a pipeline. It reduces the number of gates that would otherwise be needed to implement the function.